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my effigy burns posted:Alternatively, how about we dispense with the stupid notion that our economy correctly estimates people's potential value to society? Our current system assumes that, from birth on, the children of the very wealthy are valuable and useful and should be given a lot of resources. Furthermore, it assumes that the children of the very poor are probably worthless and shouldn't be given very many resources at all. Since 99.9% of people including 99.9% of the current upper class came from people that were once peasants, it's pretty safe to say that status at birth isn't a good indicator of eventual value. Why do you assume people have intrinsic worth? People are just meat that happens to be able to reason sometimes, usually not. You're spending a fortune on literally nothing, or less than nothing.
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Nov 26, 2015 05:55
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asdf32 posted:On the other hand it might not be a problem for another century or three or ever. Technology has been relentlessly destroying jobs for centuries and that destruction has been the main driver growth which has delivered our modern standards of living and at every step you could find people terrified of that destruction. No one knew what people would do if they weren't all tilling the fields but the answer turned out to be lots of things. According to the study I linked, the difference between technology destroying jobs now from destroying jobs then has to do with who they're replacing. Before the 90's, technology replaced high skill jobs with lots of lower/middle skill jobs. That meant more people working and more people with disposable income, who spent their money more reliably than the highly skilled. After the 90's, evidence now points to middle class jobs being hollowed out. This is not leading to the same effects. Ultimately, it depends on how much automation actually happens. Maybe transportation drivers will keep their positions despite the automation. Maybe administrators will get to stay behind a computer desk. Maybe the pharmacist's union will remain strong. It's all a bunch of maybes, and the only reason to point it out is to avoid actually talking about how to handle systemic unemployment.
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Nov 26, 2015 05:57
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my effigy burns posted:Alternatively, how about we dispense with the stupid notion that our economy correctly estimates people's potential value to society? Our current system assumes that, from birth on, the children of the very wealthy are valuable and useful and should be given a lot of resources. Furthermore, it assumes that the children of the very poor are probably worthless and shouldn't be given very many resources at all. Since 99.9% of people including 99.9% of the current upper class came from people that were once peasants, it's pretty safe to say that status at birth isn't a good indicator of eventual value. How about we not engage with sociopaths?
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Nov 26, 2015 06:03
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size1one posted:They aren't safe from lowered wages as their responsibilities are diminished. Or their workloads will increase since they now can focus on being prepared to dash out of the van while it drives itself. I'm going to let you in on a dirty little secret: They've already been increasing workloads for years. Some of it is being too cheap to hire/train drivers, a lot of it is driving people to quit/retire early before they can max out their pension/benefits and some of it is getting fresh blood to give another run at breaking the unions protecting them. Hours for a driver on an average day have gone from out of the building at 9:15 to not getting back until 6pm or later when a decade ago a driver could haul rear end and manage to catch his kid's sports game or whatever they needed to do. 180+ stops is not an uncommon number for my dad on a normal day on his route and holidays can easily hit 275 with 300+ near the end. Trucks during the holidays are HILARIOUSLY overpacked. What's comical about the whole thing is the new DIAD board and the tracking they do says he should get in by 5pm and this include a 30 minute lunch break with 2 15 minute breaks so they preach to the drivers to not hurt themselves rushing, doing unsafe lifts or taking shortcuts. Then they're bitched at for taking too long according to the computer when they get into the build. So now my dad just does everything by the book easy as he can and files a grievance whenever management tries to make him do his job unsafely. Good thing for the Teamsters taking those seriously and he maxes his pension in three years. I still think self-driving trucks are far off but yeah management is probably salivating at the fact. There's just too many ifs and driving a UPS truck isn't all straight lines. You have to compensate for a LOT of residential areas and planning an efficient route that the DIAD board likes along with sorting a truck properly.
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Nov 26, 2015 06:11
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^^^^^ oh I know. That won't stop them from pushing even further though.Freakazoid_ posted:According to the study I linked, the difference between technology destroying jobs now from destroying jobs then has to do with who they're replacing. Initially we can expect to have people who manage the machines. Automated checkout kiosks didn't replace every checkout clerk, there's still a single clerk to watch the 10 or so checkout kiosks. We may not have cheap robots that walk up stairs now, or computer vision that works in the rain, but we will eventually. GPU accelerated learning for convolution neural networks has only been a thing since 2011. It has dramatically lowered the cost for developing AI, but it's still a very new technology. size1one fucked around with this message at 07:31 on Nov 26, 2015 |
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Nov 26, 2015 06:17
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Woolie Wool posted:How about we not engage with sociopaths? We already have too many people on this rock, what good will making life easier for everyone do? In previous years, we needed all those people to produce things for the people that actually matter, now we're finally starting to become unnecessary. There were other historic leaders who understood this, we should heed their wisdom: http://www.vladtheimpaler.info/the_massacre.html
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Nov 26, 2015 06:22
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TwoQuestions posted:Why do you assume people have intrinsic worth? Uh, duh. Paying a few million a year to get a 25% share of the future earnings of a 10,000 unemployed single mothers is an incredibly good investment if one of them turns out to be J.K. Rowling, or 10,000 drunks if one of them turns out to be Picasso, 10,000 black high-school dropouts if one of them turns out to be Jay-Z, etc. I don't give a poo poo about the "intrinsic value" of harry potter or cubism or rap, but other people are willing to pay for that poo poo. If you think like a manual laborer who assumes fixed value for fixed output, you won't understand any of these concepts. But if you think like a venture capitalist, it starts to make sense. There's a reason only the dumbass conservatives read Hayek's "Road to Serfdom" and call everyone a nazi-commie, but gloss over the fact that as an Austrian school economist he was strongly in favor of basic minimum income. my effigy burns fucked around with this message at 06:33 on Nov 26, 2015 |
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Nov 26, 2015 06:30
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TwoQuestions posted:There were other historic leaders who understood this, we should heed their wisdom: http://www.vladtheimpaler.info/the_massacre.html
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Nov 26, 2015 07:05
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Removing the general populace from pointless labor they don't actually like and allowing them to focus on entirely creative and/or intellectual pursuits could lead to a veritable renaissance. I wonder what the world would be like if humans were born to this world and taught and asked first not "how do I secure my means of sustenance and property by maximizing my wealth?" but "what do I actually like to do and have real talents in?". Asked not "what do employers want most of me?" but "what really is the best part of me as a human being?". A relevant video on the subject of automation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsACeAkvFLY America Inc. fucked around with this message at 12:10 on Nov 26, 2015 |
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Nov 26, 2015 12:02
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DrSunshine posted:Oh to be certain. There will be plenty of jobs for those who mind the machines -- technicians and the like -- as well as people engaged in creative labor to take advantage of machinery, or develop new automation technology. But will the jobs created in these industries, and small/self-owned business models like Uber, Lyft and AirBNB, and work-from-home systems like the Mechanical Turk, be enough to replace the ones that are lost? Not only that, but what about the relative quality and pay of those jobs? Most of the people who build and maintain the machines are third-world workers working for a fraction of what the people who were replaced by machines were making (which leads into another oft-overlooked factor - technology and automation also make offshoring and outsourcing easier), and Uber and Lyft and MTurk are notoriously lovely jobs that pay poorly and base their business models around abusing employees. Vermain posted:Front counters, maybe, but anyone in the back is entirely disposable. The "security" (if one can call it that) which they enjoy right now is only a consequence of the price of a burger flipping machine not being low enough. Get the technology to the point where you can assemble a hamburger in 15 seconds at a high rate of accuracy and they're toast. Cost isn't the only factor keeping humans in employment in low-skill jobs. One advantage of human labor over automation is versatility. You can't tell that burger-flipping machine to go mop the floor or clean the toilets during a slow period, and even adding a new burger recipe can be troublesome for a purpose-built machine if it wasn't carefully designed to have that customizability (which costs money) in the first place. An Apple exec, talking about their use of low-wage Chinese labor, claimed that the reason they use Chinese workers was for the versatility rather than the low cost. They even gave an example of a time when the design of a new iPhone had gone through a last-minute change the night before it entered production - with machines or US workers they would have had to push the launch back, but with Foxconn they could just send the foreman to the employee dorms to go wake everyone up in the middle of the night and start training them on the change right away. TwoQuestions posted:How about we dispense with the stupid notion that everyone deserves a living. If someone can't make it, get rid of them. so edgy...hope no one cuts themselves
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Nov 26, 2015 15:27
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I look at it like this: Look at where the robots are now. Look at where they were hundred years ago. Imagine where they will be hundred years from now, while also remembering that barring some incredibly damaging scenarios, technology grows exponentially, not on a straight line. Nobody will be working in anything that requires manual labor a century from now, pretty much. So it's not relevant to me personally because I'm going to be old/dead at that point, but my kids or grandkids need to figure out an economic system/social system where labor isn't a basic building block/measure of your worth. DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Nov 26, 2015 |
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Nov 26, 2015 15:34
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DarkCrawler posted:So it's not relevant to me personally because I'm going to be old/dead at that point, but my kids or grandkids need to figure out an economic system/social system where labor isn't a basic building block/measure of your worth. No such system can possibly exist. Your value as a human being begins and ends at what you produce for other people, and for the longest time legions of laborers were needed to provide for people that matter. Now, we can finally shed some dead weight without serious economic consequences, and this trend will only get stronger over time.
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Nov 26, 2015 15:40
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LookingGodIntheEye posted:Removing the general populace from pointless labor they don't actually like and allowing them to focus on entirely creative and/or intellectual pursuits could lead to a veritable renaissance. Possibly an unmitigated social disaster with rampant depression and drug use even assuming the economic issues have been solved. Or maybe not that bad? Structured work taps into deep cultural and evolutionary roots. Yanking it out is incredibly disruptive at the least. Of course some people have interests and pursuits that are being held back by employment. Others don't. Assuming we're sure this would happen society would have to make a concerted effort to come up with a plan starting with aggressive incentives to maintain employment - subsidize wages and impose mandatory maximum hours of 30 then maybe 20 a week. Simultaneously construct other forms of organized charity, activities and social groups.
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Nov 26, 2015 15:54
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Perhaps some sort of strong democratic control of economy with planning devised to ensure that broader groups of people derive benefit from productivity increases while human involvement decreases. If only someone had ever thought of such a concept.
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Nov 26, 2015 17:18
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Yeah it's interesting how the labour movement and marxism have been so thoroughly suppressed that now people are basically rediscovering socialism from first principles like what seems to be happening in this thread (or fascism in the case of TwoQuestions)
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Nov 26, 2015 19:02
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You need a guaranteed minimum income with the stipulation that reproduction must be licensed/restricted.
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Nov 26, 2015 19:10
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Isn't that just kind of a natural effect of the GOP's war on "socialism" for the past 50 years? The problem for them is rooted in the fact that their philosophical approach isn't designed to handle what if we totally and completely won? Which one could argue they have for the moment as far as perceptions of capitalism go in the US, but they keep pushing anyway because they need to have that enemy. The result is more and more extreme policy objectives which will empower a movement to restore to a natural balance. Quite simply people are going to be more than a little annoyed if the only people who can extract wealth from the economy is those whom already have it. McDowell posted:You need a guaranteed minimum income with the stipulation that reproduction must be licensed/restricted. RuanGacho fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Nov 26, 2015 |
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Nov 26, 2015 19:15
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McDowell posted:You need a guaranteed minimum income with the stipulation that reproduction must be licensed/restricted. People automatically make less children as long as that minimum income is big enough.
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Nov 26, 2015 19:28
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TwoQuestions posted:Why do you assume people have intrinsic worth? Good point. Want to meet up irl? I'm running low on leather and your skin will do nicely. E: I also have no skulls to drink out of, and want to toast and drink right from the brainpan that inspired my new way of life. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Nov 26, 2015 |
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Nov 26, 2015 19:45
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Hodgepodge posted:Good point. Want to meet up irl? I'm running low on leather and your skin will do nicely. Ha-ha holy poo poo I missed that one. Hey Two what the gently caress is the point of fortune without meat bags to trade with o new wise and contentious robot overlord?
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Nov 26, 2015 19:49
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asdf32 posted:Possibly an unmitigated social disaster with rampant depression and drug use even assuming the economic issues have been solved. Or maybe not that bad? TwoQuestions posted:How about we dispense with the stupid notion that everyone deserves a living. If someone can't make it, get rid of them.
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Nov 26, 2015 20:01
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On the other hand, if I wanted to skin and wear some peon, I'd just take a homeless person, or perhaps visit northern BC while it remains open season for serial killers. No, I will only wear the finest of nihilistic, pampered skin. Also, without the thrill of introducing someone to real suffering, how am I to know that I and I alone own the meat I've captured?
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Nov 26, 2015 20:16
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Woolie Wool posted:It won't work this way, because this hypothetical robot economy will no longer be capitalism as we know it, but an automated slave economy. Robots will function as slave machines that contribute unpaid labor, the capital owners take their products and use them for themselves and kick a bit down to the "supermanagers" and technicians entrusted with overseeing and maintaining robotized production facilities. A class of servants (healthcare workers, caregivers, entertainers, "concubines", housekeepers, etc.) will serve the classes above them and live barely above poverty, or perhaps even in bondage. The rest of humanity would be reduced to human refuse, left to fend for themselves any way they can unless they can display some talent with which they can get into the servant class. There will no longer be a need for the current market system; the owners will consume the products directly and the "unproductives" will receive nothing (except for mass killings to keep them down or even annihilate them altogether). The only real markets will be luxury-goods markets with which the ownership class trade excess production among themselves, and barter "markets" for the poors below. Perhaps there might be some very basic welfare to keep the poors alive and prevent rebellions but their actual participation in the economy would no longer be necessary. This nightmare scenario makes no sense. What would ask this robot manufacturing be making? Why would the capital class want to make a bunch of stuff if no one else can buy it? They can't all just sell yachts to each other for very long. The robot manufacturing is worthless without a strong consumer class. Worse than worthless, it'd just be a money sink. Automation is coming, a major change in employment is coming, we will need to adapt, but it won't be like this.
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Nov 26, 2015 20:27
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PS my vote for the pick two list earlier is Mad Max and the Culture.
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Nov 26, 2015 21:24
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If you can turn the activities of your job into a flow chart your job probably will be automated eventually.
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Nov 26, 2015 22:53
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DarkCrawler posted:Look at where the robots are now. Look at where they were hundred years ago. Imagine where they will be hundred years from now, while also remembering that barring some incredibly damaging scenarios, technology grows exponentially, not on a straight line. Technology does not "grow" exponentially, nor does it "grow" in a straight line. To be honest, it's incredibly naive to try to boil down the advancement of all human knowledge and technology to a line on a bar graph.
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Nov 26, 2015 23:49
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Trent posted:This nightmare scenario makes no sense. What would ask this robot manufacturing be making? Why would the capital class want to make a bunch of stuff if no one else can buy it? They can't all just sell yachts to each other for very long. BrandorKP posted:If you can turn the activities of your job into a flow chart your job probably will be automated eventually.
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Nov 27, 2015 00:49
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my effigy burns posted:
Because it's cheaper/more profitable for the rich to kill or imprison poor people.
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Nov 27, 2015 01:25
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Main Paineframe posted:Technology does not "grow" exponentially, nor does it "grow" in a straight line. To be honest, it's incredibly naive to try to boil down the advancement of all human knowledge and technology to a line on a bar graph. Well, you've got to get a certain number of light bulbs to unlock the next technology level. It's important to build libraries for that 50% boost.
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Nov 27, 2015 01:30
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high six posted:Because it's cheaper/more profitable for the rich to kill or imprison poor people.
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Nov 27, 2015 01:48
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Nessus posted:PS my vote for the pick two list earlier is Mad Max and the Culture. Now I have.to actually bother to synthesize this in my head, thanks  Society is post scarcity because everyone lives in a virtual mad Max scenario so no one forgets the value and struggle of hard work? Yeah that's probably it.
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Nov 27, 2015 01:50
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I wonder if this trend is in accordance to Marxist analysis, or if it is something novel that Marx did not account for? From my (admittedly cursory) understanding of Marx, capitalism would eventually destroy itself through repeated crises and increasing inequality, leading to a revolution of the working class. However, it seems that history has evolved in a way such that capitalism's downfall may come from outside itself -- from global warming, and from the progression of automation technology from specific purpose (manufacturing) technology to general purpose (computing, AI, robotics) technology. I'm curious to see what a Marxist or socialist treatment of the issue of technological unemployment looks like.
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Nov 27, 2015 02:13
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I'm pretty sure its roughly, a robot in every closet and a an internet for every Thing. The second half of Manna supposes that people will have all the reasonable production they can use and they can allocate their excess to projects or frivolities they want. I find it amusing how people keep brining up profit in this scenario, they're like confused ferengi.
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Nov 27, 2015 02:24
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Thug Lessons posted:Why bother investing in robotics when there's an ample supply of third world slaves to do most manufacturing?
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Nov 27, 2015 02:31
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DrSunshine posted:I wonder if this trend is in accordance to Marxist analysis, or if it is something novel that Marx did not account for? From my (admittedly cursory) understanding of Marx, capitalism would eventually destroy itself through repeated crises and increasing inequality, leading to a revolution of the working class. However, it seems that history has evolved in a way such that capitalism's downfall may come from outside itself -- from global warming, and from the progression of automation technology from specific purpose (manufacturing) technology to general purpose (computing, AI, robotics) technology. I'm curious to see what a Marxist or socialist treatment of the issue of technological unemployment looks like. The role that automation plays in capitalism's development and its crises is central to Marx's analysis. It's kind of the main thing actually. The increasing inequality is in fact a consequence of the increase in technological productivity, which has been integral to capitalist society since the beginning. Since the start, even before Marx, socialism has been a movement concerned with dealing with technological unemployment. Workers realized that industrial advances in productivity should, in theory, mean less work and more prosperity for everyone, and that this would be true if the value of what workers produced belonged to them. Instead, under capitalism, it leads to their labour being devalued on the market as they are made to compete for their jobs with the more and more efficient machines that they build but do not own. All the extra value industrial society allows workers to produce goes to the capitalists while workers themselves are paid the minimum they need to continue existing to the extent that they're needed. Labour victories like the 8 hour work day, minimum wage, workplace safety laws, single-payer healthcare, etc, are meant to be ways for regular workers to enjoy some of the benefits of the extra productivity technology permits. The goal was never to stop at 8 hours but to keep lowering the hours on the job and increasing purchasing power as technology could be substituted more and more for human labour. Unfortunately the labour movement has been gutted and today many of these advances have gotten completely destroyed by the capitalist ruling class. Marx didn't know about global warming but wrote some stuff about the tendency towards ecological crisis, the "irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism" (he focused on soil nutrients). Bob le Moche fucked around with this message at 02:44 on Nov 27, 2015 |
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Nov 27, 2015 02:41
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Here is a little online browser game where you play as a capitalist and learn how capitalism works: http://www.molleindustria.org/to-build-a-better-mousetrap/
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Nov 27, 2015 02:46
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DrSunshine posted:I wonder if this trend is in accordance to Marxist analysis, or if it is something novel that Marx did not account for? From my (admittedly cursory) understanding of Marx, capitalism would eventually destroy itself through repeated crises and increasing inequality, leading to a revolution of the working class. However, it seems that history has evolved in a way such that capitalism's downfall may come from outside itself -- from global warming, and from the progression of automation technology from specific purpose (manufacturing) technology to general purpose (computing, AI, robotics) technology. I'm curious to see what a Marxist or socialist treatment of the issue of technological unemployment looks like. Marx's understanding was that the transition to communism from socialism required the automation of drudgery and repetitive tasks so that people could be free from a large part of alienation. So technological unemployment, or rather the kinds of technologies that would cause it under a capitalist system, was an essential part of Marx's consideration of capitalism, socialism, and production.
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Nov 27, 2015 04:11
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Bob le Moche posted:Here is a little online browser game where you play as a capitalist and learn how capitalism works: http://www.molleindustria.org/to-build-a-better-mousetrap/ RuanGacho posted:Now I have.to actually bother to synthesize this in my head, thanks
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Nov 27, 2015 05:29
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I frankly wouldn't worry about this sort of thing. I used to be worried about automation but now I think it will happen much more slowly than anyone thinks. It's not going to be a sudden explosion of robots and software doing all the jobs. Instead it's going to be really slow, stretched out over decades and generations. Technology just doesn't move that fast. We're nowhere close to the technology needed to eliminate all jobs, or even a lot of jobs. Most people's jobs are safe for the next 50+ years. We'll have plenty of time to adapt. This whole discussion is sci-fi nonsense.
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Nov 27, 2015 05:40
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Blue Star posted:I frankly wouldn't worry about this sort of thing. I used to be worried about automation but now I think it will happen much more slowly than anyone thinks. It's not going to be a sudden explosion of robots and software doing all the jobs. Instead it's going to be really slow, stretched out over decades and generations. Technology just doesn't move that fast. We're nowhere close to the technology needed to eliminate all jobs, or even a lot of jobs. Most people's jobs are safe for the next 50+ years. We'll have plenty of time to adapt. This whole discussion is sci-fi nonsense. On the other hand, incremental changes could cause massive disasters. If, for example, someone comes up with software that allows 8 engineers to do the job of 10 by automating the process of producing drawings a little, that's still 20% of engineers that are out of a job, and need a job that pays similarly to engineering. Once you move into the position of rationalizing high-paying jobs, you end up with a social crisis, as you can't turn an engineer into a bank teller or cashier without significant suffering and a further encroachment of overproduction. This can occur even though the total number of jobs lost is small compared to the economy overall.
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Nov 27, 2015 05:47
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